Estralis Seborian wrote:When exactly was the time when Illarion became so much about skills?
Actually, I was also extremely attracted to this original concept of the founders. The more I was shocked when I realised it was something between a concept that was never realised and an outright lie. Illarion always had numbers, many of them. Attributes and skills were always numbers, the latter were always shown as bars or colour changes. Player deciphered these to actual values. At one point, it was decided to drop the disguise and just show the numbers.JacobB wrote:It started when the original and really unique concept of the founder "a game without numbers" was dropped.
I was pretty astonished when I got hold of my first copy of the weapon and armour values. It is somewhat right that Illarion was not about numbers as the numbers were completely unbalanced and there was no clear connection between anything. So a lot of work was spent that players could rely on simple correlations such as “more difficult to craft = better” and “expensive = good”. One could argue if we really need to show item levels but they are there anyway.
To be not about numbers means to me something different than not showing numbers that are there; for me, it means players should be required to worry not about numbers. So the skills, rank points, levels and so on should play no major role in the game as the game is about other things. So I am supportive to any initiative to reduce the impact of e.g. rank points. These other things we need to work on! Interesting plots and an everchanging world is what we need rather than colour changes instead of numbers for skills. Let’s all try to work on making Illarion a unique game that might have its numbers but the numbers playing a minor role as great tales and myths are what players talk about!
When did standing around in a chamber in Galmair, doing nothing, not interacting with anyone, become the way of playing Illarion?
MC was introduced mid 2006. We had many cases of players idling since then. But the majority of players still interacted and did not hide from each other. This has changed and I am not really sure if this is connected to the change of MC arithmetic. In fact, the former MC implementation made you learn nothing at all from a given threshold on. So you had to do nothing skill related. This was removed and replaced by a system that never gives you the feeling you should better log out.When MC was introduced and the players recognized, that doing a small server related action resets a timer and continues to relax the MC burden.
Specialisation thru e.g. traits (see http://illarion.org/community/forums/vi ... 94&t=41771) is something I’d appreciate as long as we do not introduce fixed classes and leave the player any freedom to become whatever he/she wants. I am all for giving attributes a bigger impact so you can specialise via attributes as well. Currently, attributes play a major role in fighting (perhaps the role is even too big) but in other systems, attributes play a minor role down to no role at all. This needs to be harmonised but just the concept to use a common function to calculate attribute boni meets high resistance.- focus on specialization instead of generalism (e.g. think about skill trees or something similar, which disables jacks of all trades)
This sounds interesting, can you elaborate how this should work? I guess many agree that the old rune teaching was not really what we are looking for, right?- introduce scholar / teacher system for every skill which is worth for (but I completely dislike the former elitism as it was usual for mages, this should be avoided in any case)
I proposed this but it was declined. Instead, the gathering skills should become more useful. I am looking forward to read proposals how we can make gathering skills more useful.- remove useless gathering skills (okay, does not really related to your question.. with a scholar/teacher system it maybe makes no sense to keep them)
I think the first step is to harmonise wear. Currently, some things wear way faster than others. Just compare a dagger with a warhammer for starters. I am pretty sure we can find a good balance between the need for repair and reliability of items.- downgrade durability of items (will increase need to buy more new equipment)
I do not think players will embrace this idea.- remove repair (this is not related to current change!) (will increase need to buy more new equipment. be honest: a crafter wants to sell new and expensive equipment instead to repair something found in drops or crafted by another crafter)
Is it really an issue that players buy raw materials in significant amounts from NPCs? Are those the same who say it is difficult to make money as crafter perhaps? I need more information on this.- change dealer NPC: buy everything, but sell nothing (or only low to intermediate equipment and NO resources needed for crafting)
Free food just keeps you from starving; is it really an issue that blocks interaction that you can pick some cherries?- degrade saturation of custom food and free food
Sounds very good, any specific proposals?- add more quests that can only be solved by more than one char
Very good approach, any example of such a quest?- add quests that depend on very special skills, which cannot be available in one single char
Will priest magic, as described in the magic concept, cover this?- add "group" bonus: the more players play together, the higher the bonus (e.g. drops, treasures, chests, increased drop rates for elements and gems, skill gain, MC usage/gain, ...)
Sounds fair, but what to do if the player has not enough money? How high should the tax on “property” be?- taxation: put taxes on material assets to avoid players hoarding collected stuff and give it away to other players, which will reduce possible trades
I do not think we can implement the latter easily. I understand you want to disable that you can put bags etc. into the depot, right? I used to play another game with very limited depot size and it was somehow fun because you needed to focus. Though, you could buy additional space for real money. Many players will surely hate this idea but I am open minded here.- decrease the depot sizes drastically (sounds bad on the first view, but will enforce that only the really needed stuff is kept, first step could be to disable containers (bags, baskets) within depots)
This was proposed around a hundred times by now and if it was possible, it would have been implemented years ago. At this moment, this would take massive changes to how depots work and no one is there who has the necessary skills.- add guild depots (should have bigger size than personal depot)
my char will not longer be able to collect such things?
